December 2, 2008
Posted by Jen Reeves
Now I can’t stop
I’ve talked about social media here and in many different presentations at the Missouri School of Journalism, conferences and training seminars. I feel like all of my ramblings are a little more legitimate as more and more journalists debate on whether these trends are good or bad. Obviously I plant myself into the camp that this is good.
Feel free to view my PowerPoint slideshow.
A slide from my presentation
Twitter isnt the end-all be-all for journalism, but I do see it as a growing news tool. The trick, you need to be in there to understand how it works. For the first time, I recommended to all of my students that they should join a few social networks and learn how they work. I started out in Twitter, Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Motionbox, Vimeo (I could go on) for my personal needs online and I’ve transitioned that use into ways I can use them professionally. You cannot jump in and think you know how it works. That’s how you end up finding reports like this one. It is so easy to fall into a culture of fear. Journalists shouldn’t allow themselves to do that. I think we should act like journalists, investigate these tools and see how they can be helpful. People are using them. Let’s see how we can use them to our advantage to deliver better news to our markets.
Now I’ll try to stop ranting.
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4 Comments
December 2, 2008
Nice job on the striketrough on Pownce! You don’t miss a thing.
December 2, 2008
I’m not a journalist, but the last thing I think any journalist should do is fear social media. The first thing to do is to exploit the heck out of them! I have a vision of teams of journalists, all out in the field finding stories, but also acting as a near real time information processing “hive.” With a little help from ranking tools, headlines and info could be refined, the best floats to the top, and pops out of the team’s feed. After all, only the human journalists can really put the human angle on information and make it a real story.
December 4, 2008
Hi Jen,
Thanks for a great post! I’m in agreement that it pays for journalists, freelancers, and business owners to take full advantage of social media. Journalism and writing is all about communication, and social media tools simply expand the possibilities and effectiveness of that communication.
Jenny Cromie
(http://www.thegoldenpencil.com)
December 6, 2008
Hi Jen, Followed your link from CJR. I’m at CUNY’s j-school which is a big social media advocate but, I have a hard time getting into Twitter. It excludes 99.99% of the world’s conversation, which you allude to on CJR, and there are other avenues for connectivity. I signed up for a Twitter account but it’s not something I’d check daily or use unless I had a very specific request. I do appreciate Twitter’s benefits (i.e. Mumbai, 1st-hand accounts) but the idea of journalists joining Twitter en masse to ‘CB radio’ each other, techies and other college grads doesn’t seem helpful if I’m trying to write original stories about, you know, the world.
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